Labour’s gift to the Tories

Today we have two public schoolboys, Milne and Schneider, and a multimillionaire property guy, Lansman, manipulating Corbyn to destroy Labour. Today we have a laughingly named “People’s Chancellor” heading up a cabal dissing the democratic mandate of the Deputy Leader and the vast majority of MP’s who have won elections and are in touch with their constituents and not with an entryist faction which is using our party for its own failed political agenda. An agenda which does not relate to the voters and the reality of their lives, has no vision for the future and which has been rejected time and again by the electorate.

Jeremy Corbyn has been a weak and ineffectual leader who will never gain the trust of the electorate and never will lead a Labour government actually delivering for the electorate. Pious platitudes are no longer enough, he has shown himself to be politically inept, divisive and plain incompetent, an incompetence reinforced by his disastrous appointments of idiots with proven form such as IRA apologist John McDonnell who will never be the “People’s Chancellor” and the arrogant elitist Stalinist brat Seumas Milne with the risible title of Director of Strategy and Communication. A person less strategic and with a total inability to communicate a coherent message to the Electorate and the Party would be hard to imagine.

Aren't all these the result of “winning" in a democracy, Jon? @jonlansman

A millionaire who lives in a multi-million pound house in Richmond, Milne sent his two children not to state schools within walking distance of his house but to distant Grammar Schools and one child is now at Oxford, the other at Cambridge. His political views are even more extreme than Corbyn’s: he has described Iraqis who helped the US try to rebuild their country as “quislings”; he suggested the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby “wasn’t terrorism in the normal sense” because he had fought in Afghanistan; he has bemoaned the fall of the Berlin Wall; and, when editing the comment section of the Guardian he gave a byline to Osama bin Laden, above an extract from one of his tape-recorded diatribes. He illustrates the problem with the unelectable professional Trots and Stalinists infiltrating the broad church of the Labour Party – they pretend to be for the working class while actually despising them and not having their own lives hurt by the Tories.

Today from the members of the Corbyn sect we have more comic strip language aimed at people with comic strip minds. The simple truth is that the Labour Party has lost the plot and is hurtling towards political oblivion and irrelevance while the Tories demonstrate their ruthless efficiency. Johnson gone, Fox gone, Gove gone, Leadsom gone and a new female PM who will emphasise her difference from the Notting Hill Boys all in a week. Theresa May will widen the Tory Party’s appeal across the country to hardworking families and to women. Expect her to move fast to position the Tory Party in the centre ground, you know, the place you need to be to win a General Election.

By contrast Corbyn has shown a lack of leadership, lack of strategy, lack of focus on anything other than his own position and his 1980’s throwback politics. We have prior form. The vapid out of touch wittering of the so called “Hard Left” previously ensured Labour was unelectable for 19 long years while the Tories destroyed the country and ruined the lives of many we should have been able to protect. Ed Miliband’s leadership election reforms and Jeremy Corbyn’s presence on the ballot last year allowed the infiltration of many 10,000s from the hard left who perceive our party to be a political cult about one man. It is not, it is not Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party no more than it was Neil Kinnock’s, John Smith’s, Tony Blair’s, Gordon Brown’s or Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

So Jeremy goes on holiday during the referendum Campaign, goes to a Free Cuba meeting (You know, the country which jails Trade Unionists) in the middle of a Labour crisis. Addresses a “Miners Gala” in an area where there have been no miners since 1992, a “Gala” where Stalinist’s are welcome but not elected Labour MP’s in touch with their constituents. Very easy to be the “Wise Men” like Corbyn and Skinner when you have gone out of your way for over 30 years not to have any responsibility for dealing with realty or make decisions in the real world. Those who can do, those who can’t address a make believe Miner’s Gala.

A party that re-elected a leader knowing that 80% of its MPs have no confidence in him would be giving up on any possibility of governing.

The story of our Party over the past six years has been a total disaster which has betrayed the British Electorate and our failure has allowed others to inflict great damage on British Society, on the Union, on our country’s standing in the world and on our economy where debt has doubled and our trade deficit with the rest of the world stands at £192 Bn. a year, an incredible 6% of GDP. Now with BREXIT we face the biggest danger to jobs, to rights, to our young people’s future and almost certain recession

Anyone (especially on left) who still think that Jeremy can stay on should listen to @Ed_Miliband on #wato just now. Important interview.

I have spent many years as a Labour campaigner and candidate while others who are now vocal campaigned against my Party. The context for the revolt against JC does exist. Polls show if a snap election is held this year (very possible) under Corbyn and his desultory leadership Labour could be reduced to 75 seats – what would we deliver for anybody then? More right on platitudes and hot air? We gave Ed Miliband 5 years of loyalty despite doubts and the flip flopping policies and we let down the people we should be standing up for by losing a winnable election in 2015, with the truly disastrous consequences we see today. This time we don’t have the luxury of waiting 5 years until Labour crashes into another wall.

Did Jeremy Corbyn even release a written statement on May’s coronation/appointment? Has he led in framing the negatives of her record in various offices? Has the shadow Cabinet followed up with consistent messaging? Will anyone in Labour be ready and prepared for the next day or so’s Cabinet announcements? The effective Opposition are backbench Tories and the SNP, Labour has made itself irrelevant. 172 of his colleagues – who have tried to work with him, have concluded that he has failed to provide the leadership for the party in the House of Commons. If he can’t do it at Westminster – how can he expect the electorate to believe he is capable of giving leadership to the whole country as Prime Minister? It is astonishing that he or any other candidate for Labour Leader is prepared to stand without substantial support from the Party’s MPs.

The Labour Party on the other hand has now shown that it no longer cares about winning elections or representing working people. A divided, disastrous Tory party which has missed every economic target, which has destroyed the Union and our membership of the most successful co-operative economic union founded with moral purpose which has transformed Europe and Britain for the better. And we are still 7% behind the Tories in the polls and our party is a laughing stock in the country. People voted for us in by-elections and mayoral elections despite Jeremy Corbyn who was kept well away by the candidates.

We have two very relevant polls. The General Election in 2015 which tells us that we need to win 106 mainly Conservative seats in England and 56 seats we lost in Scotland to form a future Labour Government and the EU Referendum in June 2016 where Jeremy cannot even tell us what side he voted for? The British Public did not elect us in 2015 because they did not trust Labour with immigration, with the economy, with defence, with taxation. We have spent the months since May 2015 proving the electorate’s instinct absolutely right.

In 1935 the Labour Party was in crisis. Attlee become the Leader and the party began on its road to the great victory of 1945. But first the Party had to get rid of its well meaning, but ineffectual leader, George Lansbury. Ernie Bevin publicly warned Lansbury, “It is placing the Executive and the Movement in an absolutely wrong position to be hawking your conscience around from body to body asking to be told what to do with it.”

The unelectable change nothing, deliver nothing other than hot air and betray the electorate by not providing an alternative government. Not winning means a country led by Tories. Not winning is the ultimate betrayal of working class people. Not winning means selling Britain and its people short.

In 1898, to widespread bemusement, a small Provincial Newspaper in an equally small town in the South West corner of Ireland sonorously warned the Czar of Russia that it knew what he was up to and he should be careful how he proceeded for “The Skibbereen Eagle” was wise to his game and in future would be keeping its eye on him! It is doubtful that Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, even noticed the Eagle’s admonitions but as history soon proved he should have paid closer attention to the Eagle’s insightful opinions!

Today, powered by its readers and contributors, from its cyber eyries in Ireland and the centres of the Irish Diaspora The Eagle casts its Cold Eye on Life and Death and much in between.

One Response

R Godfrey

The problem I have is the ‘compromise’ the PLP is offering, oh look a Blairite, tbh if the price of victory is more of that horrendous ideology, I’d rather the tories wrecked the place than someone claiming to be Labour did exactly what the tories would have done.